My thoughts, and opinions on many subjects. But it's always a mad world.

Updating Tuesdays, and Saturdays, with a video blog the last Thursday of each month (Most of the time anyway). On Sunday I roll over, and go back to sleep.

So Who is Amanda Harper?

Well to start with I'm obviously a writer, though of everything from very alternative romances to crime dramas.

I'm a lesbian, trans-woman in her 30's, who is very much into her royal blue hair (now purple), velvet and leather filled wardrobe and of course my oversized shit kicking goth boots. Oh, and I'm a hardcore PC, and tabletop gamer.

In this blog I want to hit on subjects that I don't have another medium for. Expect reviews of games old and new, though mostly old. Expect rants about the world in general. Expect the occasional lapse into convoluted personal philosophy. Oh and definitely expect some stuff on BDSM, after all I was a professional dominatrix for a few years and enjoy the BDSM lifestyle in my private life now.

So I hope you enjoy the randomness of my ruminations, and let the madness commence.

(Please feel absolutely welcome to comment on any and all of my posts. I have only three rules...
1: avoid Godwins rule.
2: avoid bad language.
3: I'm not here to provide free advertising to commercial websites, comment if you wish but I will edit out links post to such sites.
Other than that enjoy yourself, and please feel free to have a pretty signature.)

Halloween 2011 – a television review.

I think we can all agree that Halloween is quite simply the most wonderful time of the year. After all it’s that one time of each year you can dress up as a zombie Playboy Bunnygirl, and not wind up being arrested. Adding in insane amounts of sweet stuff, alcohol, and potentially embarrassing trysts to the mix is frankly just the icing on already very sweet cake. But one thing usually ends up being a massive disappointment. Television at Halloween.

This year admittedly was better than most. E4 again screened the wonderful zombie filled, reality television ass-ripping that is “Dead Set”. If you’ve missed it again, get it on DVD, buy some popcorn, and settle in for Zombie Shakespeare the way it was meant to be seen.

There were several slasher films shown on various channels. And the Horror Channel went all Hammer Horror, screening “The Scar of Dracula”, “Blood of the Mummy”, and its usual mixture of modern B-movie pleasures.

Of course Syfy joined in with the hilarious “Tremors 2: Aftershocks”, and “Tremors 3: Return to Perfection” on Saturday and Sunday. admittedly they’re B-monster movies rather than horror, but were still welcome additions to my televisual Halloween.

But here’s the sting in the tail. While “Dead Set”, and the Hammer movies are real horror. The “Tremors” series are as I just said monster movies, and slasher movies to my mind simply aren’t horror either. Neither for the record is the torture porn that these days often masquerades as horror in the cinema. But worse still is the fact that all of them were shown on Saturday and Sunday. Or in other words, not on Halloween! No last night the only horror we had the choice of watching was “Halloween: Resurrection”, yet another badly written, badly realised, rehash of the classic “Halloween” franchise. Or Ashton Kutcher trying, and failing, to fill Charlie Sheens shoes in “Two and a Half Men”. Just so you know, in case you missed them, Ashton was far scarier.

So this leaves me wondering why is it that on what’s supposed to be the spookiest night of the year, I just watched “Mythbusters”, “Two and a Half Men”. Then, loathing what both time, and hollywood has done to John Carpenters classic, the only actually horrific slasher movie “Halloween”, curled up with a good book?

Why can’t the television networks, and companies get through their heads that on Halloween a good selection of genuine horror movies would go down a treat? Why not show a selection of classic horrors, “Dracula”, “Frankenstein”, “The Wolf Man”? Why not let a new generation discover the joys of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, or either of the two Lon Chaney’s? If they have to go more modern, why not show us “The Omen”, “The Amityville Horror”, or One of John Carpenters classics such as “The Thing” or “Prince of Darkness”?

No instead we get, if we’re very lucky like this year, a television show edited down into a movie, a couple of Hammer horrors, some monster B-movies that didn’t even scare the 5-year-old Force of Nature. In fact she fell asleep watching those. Well it’s over for another year, maybe next year we’ll be treated to some real scares. But in the mean time I think it’s time to make a date with a certain hot Russian girl of my acquaintance for a horror DVD marathon. Nothing like oceans of horrifying blood to wash away that bad post Halloween aftertaste.